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But all it took was one question to put the 43 year-old star of 30 Rock in total touch with his bad self.

“What kind of material can Toronto look forward to?” I asked him about his March 23 appearance at the Sony Centre as part of the Canadian International Comedy Fest.

“People should stop focusing on what I’m gonna say all the time. It’s like they’re all waiting for something to complain about. I think the focus should be on funny.”

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That would probably be a wise move for Morgan considering the trouble some of his unscripted ad libs have gotten him into in the past year.

At a June 3, 2011 show in Nashville, Morgan went on a homophobic rant and said he would “pull out a knife and stab” his son if he came out as gay.

It took all the king’s horses, all the king’s men and Tina Fey to do damage control on that one.

But a few weeks later, he was back at Caroline’s Comedy Club in New York, saying “Don’t ever mess with women who have retarded kids. Them young retarded males is strong. They’re strong like chimps.”

He remains unrepentant.

“Look, this is comedy, man, this is where we let our hair down. I put all those things out there so people will react. I know what I’m doing, I know it all the time.

“I don’t do nice comedy. I don’t believe in storks. I know they don’t deliver babies, they deliver pickles.”

The stork was nowhere in evidence when Morgan was born in Brooklyn on Nov. 10, 1968 and neither was his father, James, who got hooked on heroin during his tours of duty in Vietnam and finally left the family when Morgan was 6.

“I’m a 43-year-old man from Bed-Stuy and that tells you all you gotta know, man” he says, referencing Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, legendarily one of the toughest of all New York’s ghettos.

“I wasn’t raised in the kind of house that had a (expletive) pond in the backyard, you dig? When I was a kid, I didn’t know how to express myself, I didn’t know (expletive). Maybe Eddie (Murphy) had his thing together at 15, but God had to leave me in the oven a little longer.”

Morgan saw a lot of tough times during that additional baking. According to his 2009 autobiography, I Am the New Black, he moved back in with his father as a teenager and was with him when he died of AIDS.

“There’s nothing I won’t talk about from my life,” he admits. “To me, comedy is the sword that cuts through the world’s despair and I have to cut through my despair every day as well.”

He was doing standup by the age of 14, made his network TV debut a decade later on Martin and finally hit Saturday Night Live at 28.

But along with the laughs and the fame came a lot of substance abuse, numerous arrests, a case of diabetes and a kidney transplant.

“Yeah, I been through a lot and it all winds up in my comedy. One night I was gonna go onstage to do my set and this dude asked me, ‘How much time you got?’ and I told him, ‘I got 43 years worth.’”

By this point, Morgan had settled into a groove and he actually laughed. “You and me, we’re not like Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell. We are connected, you hear? Connected!

“But it takes time and people don’t want to spend time today. This whole generation wants it microwave, right now. It took me 20 years to come up with my bone.”

“You know who I am? I am Bruce Lee. I punch at what comes at me. And I hit the mother every time. People ask me what my style is. I don’t have a style. Anything that happens to me, that’s my style.”

The biggest thing that happened to him in recent years, obviously, is 30 Rock.

From the minute that Fey’s surreal take on the world that may (or may not) have been SNL hit the air in 2006, Morgan was a very big part of its success.

He plays a character unapologetically called Tracy Jordan: to many people it would seem there is no difference between Morgan and Jordan.

But co-star Jane Krakowski, whom I interviewed last summer, provided an insight into the line between illusion and reality on the program.

“Lots of people think this show cuts more closely to the bone than it actually does. (Tina) takes touches of all of us for sure: Liz’s love for cheese; Alec’s desire to advise; my overeagerness to perform; Tracy’s gift for saying the wrong thing; always these little bits and characteristics. And then the choices we make as actors come from someplace where there is a truth within us.

“I think we’re a lot like our characters and a lot not like them as well. You have to be willing to make fun of yourself on 30 Rock. Self-deprecation is a very big part of the whole thing.”

Morgan riffs on the issue. “I’m natural unnaturally. I don’t censor myself anywhere. There are some things I can’t say on TV, like profanity, but I don’t think that’s right.

“Profanity can be very useful, you know? It’s just another form of language, another way of expressing your feelings. If you stepped on my corn right now and I just said ‘Ow!’ you might not know how much you hurt me. But if I said” — and here Morgan let loose an unprintable string of expletives — “then you’d know the kind of pain I was in.”

He likes the way the train of thought has taken him.

“Yeah, profanity lets you tell people about the pain. People shouldn’t always focus on the words. They should focus on the feelings behind them. It’s not what you say, it’s what you mean.”

Then like the calm after the storm, Morgan speaks quietly.

“Everybody who comes to see me is not going to like me, I know that. But I believe that if you don’t offend somebody, then you’re probably not funny.

“I try to laugh every day, I try to cry every day. You get that going, you got a full life. You hear me?”

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